Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Wayne
LaPierre said something that was simultaneously simplistic and
annoying:

"The
only thing
that stops
a bad guy with a gun
is a good guy
with a gun.”

These
words annoyed me the moment I heard them, but it took an off-handed
comment to understand exactly why. When I linked to a news story
about this*, and read back that sentence, he smiled wryly and said,
“Yknow, I'd accept help from a second bad guy who hates the first
one, in a pinch.”

And
that's it. There's this common thought that the world is set up like
a movie – more specifically, like a Western – where there are
such things as bad guys and good guys. As Terry Pratchett once said
through one his best characters, “I believe you find life such a
problem because you think there are good people and bad people.
You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people,
but
some of them are on opposite sides.”** Or, to go straight-up
biblical, “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is
desperately sick; who can understand it?”

Reduce
that sentence a little: “The only thing that stops a bad guy is a
good guy.” Take away the whole firearms issue, and you're left with
what sounds like a middle schooler explaining his Batman short story
to his teacher.*** It's reductive and silly.

So,
let's see if we can save it.

“One
of the primary things that stops an aggressive attacker with a gun is
another trained attacker.”

Okay,
this I can work with. It doesn't make my eyelid twitch with cognitive
dissonance. It's a little long and and complicated, but inarguable,
right? Well . . .

Crisis
negotiation began in 1972 as a way to resolve conflicts between law
enforcement and civilians without using lethal force. While it's
effectiveness is debatable, it is inarguable that violent crime has,
despite what you might hear, gone down, and many credit crisis
resolution techniques with that reduction.****

The
best possible solution to anyone attacking with a weapon is, of
course, to prevent it happening in the first place. Needless to say,
this is rarely going to involve gunplay.

So,
we're left with another rephrasing:

“Once
prevention and negotiation have failed, an aggressive attacker can be
stopped by another trained attacker.”

And
this is the problem with press conferences and soundbites. Try
getting a single article written about your speech when you say
something that boring and dry. Still, we have to try. We have to have
a conversation about this, where we're willing to talk using our
big-people words, where we speak not in absolutes and certainties,
but try to use the study and work of others to help us come to a
solution, knowing that any solution we find will not be permanent and
will not end violence.

Because
this isn't bad guys versus the good guys, and it never, ever has
been. There are no white hates, and no black hats, just shades of
grey. And, well, some taupe and ecru, for some of the truly
exceptional. We're all in this together. All
of us. It's high time we started acting like it.

*For
those who don't know, NRA President Wayne LaPierre said these words
at a press conference, in follow-up to the Sandy Hook shootings. I'm
not interested in talking about gun control here, but in case you
need that context, there it be.

**
Lord Vetinari in “Guards, Guards” – really, the book's a
perfectly adequate introduction to Pratchett's Discworld. I prefer to
start people off with Small Gods as it's nicely self-contained, but,
well, just get started somewhere.

***
Of course, I've now just implied that Batman is a good guy – ooog.
Just pretend I said Green Lantern instead. Wait, what's that? He
helped the Guardians hide the creation of the Manhunters and hindered
their prosecution. Oh, sod. Captain America, then. No, wait, he went
directly against a federal order in opposing the Superhuman
Registration Act. Huh. Even comic book morality is more complex than
Wayne LaPierre's.